• chapter ten •
All over the body are hands and eyes.
—Zen Master Yunyan
Keizan Jokin was the successor of Zen Master Dogen (1200–1253) who brought Dogen’s dharma out of monastic seclusion and into the hands of ordinary people, including peasants and women, even bestowing dharma succession upon the brilliant nun Ekyu. His verse for Case 37 of the Transmission of the Light evokes the mystery of a human life making its way in emptiness:
A solitary boat is making its way
without oars in the dim moonlight;
Turning the head, one can see motionless
waterweed on the old bank.
Your true self has no name and also your name. The solitary boat of this life makes its way in the flow with the no-oars of realization; emptiness has no hands and eyes and so needs ours. When we turn to consciously regard it—the beautiful, daily struggle or practice of becoming a little more like this—we see eternity (the old bank, the waterweed) completely undisturbed by our passage toward or wake that follows realization. Moving boat, and old bank in its eternal stillness. With what delicate poignancy Keizan lets the one slip through the other unhindered, both discerned in the dim moonlight of human clarity.
Zen Master Bassui (1327–1357) said of the Unborn, that core of us that knows no change within a world of change: “It was not born with this body, it does not die with its extinction, it is not male, it is not female, it is not good or bad. It is beyond all comparisons and thus we call it Buddha Nature, that which lies beyond all limitations, dividedness, comparison.” And from this comes the assurance of Guanyin, the deeply at ease embodiment of our own portion of universal compassion, in whose comportment we recognize the chord of compassionate responsiveness that cannot not hear the cries of the world.
The limitless body that’s sometimes called “great body” is identical with this unborn core of all that is, while having human hands and eyes and sometimes pretty dirty feet, as well as human tides of life and feeling flowing through it. Mortal and Unborn, as with life and death, meet and touch in every step we take. Like children playing skip-rope in sunlight—feet and shadow, touching, touching, then again touching. And like the way we come into being on the in breath and give ourselves away on every out breath. Our very breath never stops interweaving birth and death. We are woven of birth and death. Life and death touching, touching and then touching is the only way there is to walk, skip, and dance along the path.
The bodhisattva of universal compassion—Avalokitesvara, Guanyin, Kannon—is sometimes depicted in the pose of “royal ease”: one arm extended and resting gracefully on one knee raised from her seated posture. But other times she has eight or more arms radiating from each of her shoulders, implying unlimited readiness to hear, see, and respond to distress in the world, with the clear-eyed, intuitive immediacy the Diamond Sutra calls “non-thinking.”
Looking closely, you find the palm of each open hand is engraved with an open eye. Insight into emptiness and the action of compassion arise together in fitting response to just what is needed—inseparable. This radiant availability and good fit with circumstances is the healing antidote to all aloofness, inertia, indifference, denial, distraction, or dissociation from real pain.
We sit to realize what it means to be human. Actually, any Buddha image is in essence an equals sign, clearly establishing that “You’re a human being. You, too, can realize fully if you really care and commit to this deeply enough.” Buddha figures exist not to be worshipped or propitiated but to remind how it isn’t so good to go around speaking and acting half asleep, bumping into things as if we’re not a good fit here. That when we awaken we find nothing that can really bump into anything else.
Eight-Tenths of the Answer
In Case 89 of The Blue Cliff Record, Yunyan is once more sharing dharma conversation with his fellow monk, Daowu, when he asks: “How does the Bodhisattva Guanyin use all those many hands and eyes?”
Daowu gives one of the most tender and low-lit replies in the annals of Zen: “It is like someone in the middle of the night reaching behind her head for a pillow.” So close to no thought at all, the lovely sense of just doing the most natural thing in the world to restore ease.
Daowu wonders how Yuyan sees it. “How about you, how do you understand it?” Yunyan offers an intimately human glimpse of that body of reality—that cannot possibly leave out this very body—and how naturally it manifests responsive connectedness. “All over the body are hands and eyes.”
They talk on a little, Daowu suggesting playfully, “That’s well-expressed but only eight-tenths of the answer.” I think of a child I once saw allowed to play with a retractable tape measure in a carpentry workshop when school holidays had complicated life for his hardworking father. The boy vigorously subjected all kinds of things, large and small, to measurement, each time finding excitedly, “Five! It’s five!” And each time, his father approved with lovely seriousness. “Yep, five it is.”
Yunyan is at ease with this—it’s all five, anyway—and plays back: “How about you, elder brother?” “Throughout the body, hands and eyes,” says Daowu, implying—teasingly?—that we need a more complete summation.
But can it be more complete? All over the body are hands and eyes, throughout the body, hands and eyes. No inside, no outside, no way to measure or gauge this body. And no way to limit or hold back the response of hands and eyes.
If all over this very body of awakening, and the entire, empty body of form—are hands and eyes, if that is what compassion might be, is this a glimpse of the fleshed-out, actualized, live, inhabited body of awakening? From the heart of non-thinking, we meet the unexpected directly—or as the Diamond Sutra puts it, “Dwelling nowhere, [we] bring forth that mind.”
This mind is fresh and fitting, because as Linji tells us, “When you know who you are, then you can be of some use.” That knowing of course is always fresh with unknowing.
When the response is as natural and unpremeditated as Daowu’s words imply—“Like someone in the middle of the night reaching behind her head for a pillow,” self dropped away without stirring into thought to act so completely appropriately—then everything in the world is made a little more comfortable and at ease. This is what the bodhisattva of compassion does with the precision and effortlessness of her many hundreds of thousands of hands and eyes. Which are in consonance with events, to the point of doing next to nothing at all.
Consider your own hands closely. How strange they are, have you noticed? They move like this and then like this, with no effort of thought carrying out this marvelous activity. They’re formed with equal effortless aplomb on the same skeletal life blueprint that gives fins to sea mammals, paws and clawed feet to land creatures, and are scarred and shaped particularly by your life, the way you hold a pen, the kind of work you do, the injuries, arthritis, piano-playing . . .
Contemplate the many hands that have worked to form and house your life, beginning with the fact that you were born into a pair of human hands. Hands received you, cradled, touched, and soothed you, they were entirely necessary and enough at that moment. With just an ordinary measure of good luck, hands have stroked your brow, snatched you from danger, prepared and cooked food for you, sewed clothes, built houses, made a bed for you . . .
Hands can harm as well as ignite trust and love, but consider especially the times you have been touched by hands that see you, truly see you, or those moments when you have touched another with hands that really see them. We need that kind of touch to live. When you touch with hands that truly see the other, that is Guanyin—and will be hands that clearly see the other as not other to yourself.
The Work of Hands and Eyes
The many hands and eyes that carry out the natural action of compassion are not complicated by complaint or the mind of right and wrong, any more than are the rocks and welling waves, or the petrels wheeling above them in and out of squalls of rain. They belong to that which clearly sees no way to stand apart from the way things are. And so they collaborate with the whole in the same way any ecosystem is collaboration—a deeply experienced improvisation of many lives in balance and concert, reaching gradually into every corner of a place in any long and undisturbed undulation of time. This.
As we know, this is a word that cannot be limited but is the relinquishment of any limiting move. This leaves nothing out, refuses nothing, is a state of affinity and co-arising. Distinctions are clear and beautiful, but not pitted or ranged against each other, in this. Which is why it describes such a comprehensive and unsentimental embrace of the action of love—“I have already become like this,” just this person, no rank, simply at home.
Each year on the day in Easter known as Maundy Thursday, a strange scene unfolds in Westminster Cathedral. The Queen of England puts on very special gloves, takes a bowl full of water complete with silver dipper, and approaches five or six selected pensioners, who no doubt have already had their feet scrubbed and disinfected. The silent pensioners are seated on special high seats like shoeshine chairs, offering the Queen access to their feet with no bending, let alone kneeling, required. She comes slowly by each one, tips a little water over each foot, before drying them most briefly, in distant echo of the original example of profound humility. On the eve of his death, Jesus stripped off most of his clothing and knelt before each of his disciples to wash and dry their dirty, dusty, gnarled feet. Some protested saying, “It’s we who should kneel down and wash your feet.” And when he said, “Well, then, you can not be one of mine,” they said, “Then purify all of me, not just my feet.” Yet just those feet are the whole matter.
I find that first-century scene to be an elemental pointer to the heart of human emptiness, its warm-blooded mystery: Master and servant, lord and disciple, completely gone, dissolved into each other, leaving us all with the blessing of no difference. In doing so it honors and lifts up the lowliest, humblest and most unapologetically human part of the body. Look at your feet, how genuine they are. Feet are so unashamedly what they are and what they do, in constant touch with the earth. These travel-worn bare feet were now so tenderly touched, skin-to-skin contact.
Here is an untroubled sacrifice of all self-importance—delicately foreshadowing the preparing of a body for burial. And central to this scene of care is water, source and constituent of all life. The scene embodies a radical gesture of “become like this,” in a form inseparable from the truth of suffering. It presents a complete undoing of self and other while so intimately affirming “you” and “me.” It is calm, timeless, and directly facing reality with no flinching away—love stripped bare of any imposture. Above all it is most “ordinary” with no self-conscious doing of something “good.” The true person of no rank has nobody looking on. Throughout the body, loving hands, awake eyes.
All strict protocols about a rabbi not touching anyone, let alone the dirty feet of a disciple, considered a profane part of the body—all gone, washed away. Worldly and unworldly, purity and impurity, along with self and other—all dissolved by this touch. Whereas the Queen’s Maundy Thursday ritual washing of the feet, meant to signal a profound reversal of “commoner” and “monarch,” not only retains but also rigidly restates difference and distance. It is riddled with imposture and sanitized into impurity.
Hands and eyes appear all over and throughout the body when awareness shifts toward becoming like this, resuming our original, intimate agreement with reality, the self all but forgotten. Helping hands and seeing eyes appear in a calm and unshakeable embrace of reality that has no preferences, makes complete room for the other, whoever they may be. They serve with no thought of doing so, taking the most modest of positions, congruent with the way that everything moves together, and doing what needs doing. Utterly proving the unbreakable nature of the red thread.
Mazu described such action this way: “Benefit what cannot be benefited, and do what cannot be done.” Nothing is benefited or done to the extent that there’s no you or me intruded in the benefiting and doing. “It is only for your benefit”—Dongshan’s startling words when the frog was torn in two and his fellow monk cried, “Why does it come to this?”—were also thoroughly dangerous words, in the light of Mazu’s “no benefit.” Dangerous in the best of ways: They invite you to become like this—congruent. When you see that you are this, the benefit is realized: “You” and “me” dropped away into everything moving together. The red thread is the constant benefit of what cannot be benefitted.
Containment
Since everything moves together, when we know ourselves like this then we have access to a measure of constancy, assurance, and ease and can be of some help.
Walt Whitman lets us see how the work of these hands and eyes throughout the body looks like, in the context of the whole earth, in “A Song of the Rolling Earth”:
The earth does not withhold, it is generous enough.
The truths of the earth continually wait,
They are not so concealed, either—
They are calm, subtle, un-transmissible by print,
They are imbued through all things,
Conveying them selves willingly.
. . . The earth does not argue,
Is not pathetic, has no arrangements,
Does not scream, hasten, persuade, threaten, promise,
Makes no discriminations, has no conceivable failures,
Closes nothing, refuses nothing, shuts none out.
The nature of the earth ultimately teaches only containment—including all, shutting none out. Containment is, like practice, a creative act grounded in acceptance of the wholeness of reality. Containment informs practice exactly as practice reveals containment. To the extent that we don’t actively concede the containing nature of the earth, it will catch us up with what we have been failing to notice, in drastic form.
Containment implies practiced and practical inclusiveness, a strong, demanding spiritual poise of openness toward the world. “Containment,” of course, also includes you, just as you are—just this person. This equanimity is its coherence. It grows more possible to be with what is happening and to more calmly rely on that even in apparent disaster, or the approach of death. The rest, once you look, is conjecture, denial, wishful moving off.
To see the coherence and inclusive power of the red thread is to begin to trust and follow the serious dictates of the heart, even though circumstances may provoke powerful feelings that are hard to include and contain. That very difficulty is part of the value and intelligence strong feelings serve. The inestimable late Daniel Berrigan warned us, “Don’t be afraid to be afraid. Don’t be appalled to be appalled.” Nothing that matters has ever been saved by turning away in fear or disgust.
The containment of the earth is its ecological coherency, the beauty of that vulnerable and yet exquisitely formed and continually reforming tendency toward relatedness—which is self-healing. All of which is a pointer to the thing called a practice. As Basho said, to become a poet (or congruent with reality and able to speak that), learn from nature and follow nature. If you look to the natural world, you will see how to become like this—open, un-opinionated, poised. Walt Whitman, again:
I swear the earth shall surely be complete
To him or her who shall be complete,
The earth remains jagged and broken
Only to him or her who remains jagged and broken.
To be asleep to the undivided essential nature of reality is to “remain jagged and broken.” Look closely at any oiled or polished timber floor or tabletop, and see how the grain of the wood reveals all but the very cells of the tree it came from, the secret inner life that formed them. And every one of those cells came into being from nothing, into this that we casually call table, or timber floor. We walk on it just as though we know all about that. But every tiny grain of being in that floor came out of a small seed possessed of the entire intelligence of that tree, and that minute capsule of such complex intelligence itself came out of . . . nothing. That completeness!
Everything comes out of everything else (which is nothing) and ultimately goes back in, is freely offered, and completely given back. This no-thing is the entire strange matter we call being, existence, the entire dance of form and energy. It is one vast cooperative matter of hands and eyes all over the body of reality. How do we dare take for granted the infinitely ramified and inexplicable being of the earth, and of trees, and of each other, and of grass, of fingernails, spiders, leaves, and dust! Inert toward the miracle of being, we leave our own finely receptive hands and eyes idle, dead, closed.
Whitman also famously said, “I contain multitudes.” People quite quickly come to realize that the meditation seat—commonly a cushion just a little less than one meter square—like Vimalarkirti’s small room, easily contains multitudes; not just the multitudinous, shifting faces of this possible “self,” but all beings throughout space and time sit here with us, included, contained. Those many beings we vow to save must be wondering as deeply as we are right now just what it is that we will do, how it is that we will lend emptiness our many human hands and eyes, in the work of restoring completeness to the jagged and broken way we have regarded the earth.
The Iroquois Way is the understanding that “the earth and I are of one mind.” The Iroquois leader known as Peacemaker, founder of the Iroquois Confederacy, committed to the proposition that “We must not let our strong understanding die from the earth.” Peacemaker addressed the United Nations in Geneva in 1977, beginning his speech with the words “We are shown . . .”—not “We know,” “We assert,” or “We hold it to be self-evident,” but the deeply gracious “We are shown . . .” reminding us quietly that this showing has indeed been happening continuously from the first light of consciousness on this planet, all the way up to now. If we choose to turn toward it.
He said: “We are shown that our life exists with the tree life, that our well-being depends on the well-being of the vegetable life. That we are close relatives of the four-legged beings. In our Way spiritual consciousness is the highest form of politics. We believe that all living things are spiritual beings. Spirits can be expressed as energy forms manifested in matter. A blade of grass is an energy form manifest in grass matter. The spirit of the grass is that unseen force that produces the species of grass and is manifest to us in the form of real grass.”
He goes on to clarify the politics demanded of us as one body, a deep, planetary communion of subjects rather than isolated individuals competitively pitted against the rest and struggling to survive. He says, “Righteousness occurs when the people put their minds and emotions in harmony with the flow of the universe and the intentions of the good mind. The principles of righteousness demand that all thoughts of prejudice, privilege, or superiority be swept away, and that recognition be given to the reality that the creation is intended for the benefit of all equally, even the birds and animals, the trees and insects, as well as the human beings.”
It’s a stark and bitter fact that across the world a politics geared to exploit every nook and cranny of angry fear is evident at exactly the moment when “minds and emotions [put] in harmony with the flow of the universe and the intentions of the good mind”—or throughout the body, hands and eyes—are the only politics that will save the earth.
Or more precisely, that will save us from ourselves.
Not-Knowing Is One Mind
The not-knowing of Guanyin is the antithesis of thoughtlessness; it is instead the seamlessness that wakes us up and into which we reawaken.
Zen Master and poet Ikkyu (1394–1481) realized the true nature of his entire body while lying in a rowboat in the dark on Lake Biwa, when across those darkened waters came the sudden cry of a crow: “Aaarrrrrrgghhhhhhk.” And suddenly Ikkyu had nowhere to put his entire body, right there in that small boat, vast lake, huge night sky, miraculous sound. Later, he wrote:
hearing a crow with no mouth
cry in the deep darkness of the night
I feel a longing for my father before he was born
Crow-cry can have so many quasi-human edges in it, uncannily suggesting (and somehow all at once) homelessness, nameless sorrow or regret, an indeterminate edge of fear that might be exile, some kind of bitter strength (that Mary Oliver called “the deep muscle of the world”). This makes them powerful prophets. In the Australian indigenous dreamtime crows can fly backward when they wish; crows are carrion eaters, opportunists that turn a cold eye on those same proclivities evident in us. Or so it can feel, when they choose to let down three, slow, soul-withering comments as they trawl the open sky, three deepening tones of dark contempt—cark carrrk caaaawarrrkkk!!!
But in that rowboat on the lake it is a crow with no mouth that kindly restores to full life an ear with no Ikkyu. So wonderfully, humanly empty. Leaving no one here to “know”—which would be to replace what is, the whole of it, with petty mental moves of this and that. Ikkyu’s “longing for my father before he was born” that surges through with grievous joy brushes the great koan, “What is your original face since before your parents were born?” Which in turn so delicately touches the fertile dark of our being—our shared unborn Mind—that lies open, infinitely earlier than conception.
What is the original face of this very body, the Buddha, older than father . . . older than crow, lake, stars? That crow-cry from no thing at all into no one at all plunged him into the great, sustaining longing that wakes up in us when we are brushed by the real. “Hearing a crow with no mouth”—there was no crow at that moment, and certainly no Ikkyu. The mouth that speaks these very words has no tongue. And the longing is the most productive form that gratitude can ever take. Bodhicitta—the human longing to be present and complete in your own entire body—discovers throughout the body, hands and eyes.
Ikkyu’s depth of seeing brings together human longing and the inconceivable; that’s what restores our full immediacy of ready hands and eyes, renders us able to be of some help. Len Anderson’s poem “On the Nature of Things” brings a squawking crow completely at home in unknowing together with the grievous joy of the moments when “I will never know what I am” is exactly what brings us home, right where we have always been:
The squawking crow
flies down from the redwood tree
to tell me
he is not a crow.
Not bird, not passerine bird
of the family Corvidae,
nor mind nor body
nor thing.
And not a crow.
In fact, he says,
he hasn’t even been
discovered yet.
The poet goes on to speak of the longing to know that can seize a child’s wonder and draw him toward a dream of completeness—of climbing marble stairs to a magical room where he will be able to open and read The Book of What Each Thing Is. But he also already knows that although golden light floods down from that room, it will remain forever too high up ever to reach.
Not to worry, crow tells him, the black of his wings is deeper than any book.
As a child, one afternoon I fell asleep in late afternoon sun on a small balcony right next to my curled-up dog and dreamt that a small cloud of fairies came down to exactly where I was lying, now wide awake within the dream, to place in just my hands the all-surpassing, jewel-encrusted book that I knew contained the secret of what everything is. In my dream, I accepted the book in astonishment and drew it open. The page that fell open had marvelous, untellable images—goldembossed, gorgeously colored, and . . .
And the moment the sunlight fell upon the open page, as my eyes rushed to absorb it, the page faded to white, faster than thought. I turned one more page half open but saw the appalling fading immediately beginning and snapped the book shut. Better to have and hold the treasure, complete and unknowable, than jeopardize and lose it with my hunger to know. I think of Robert Aitken’s warning: “We are not here to clear the mystery up; we are here to make the mystery clear.”
And All Beings
Joanna Macy and John Seed created the powerful ritual of “The Council of All Beings,” many years ago now. In a recent incarnation of the ritual in New Zealand, together with about twenty adults and a dozen children, we asked ourselves to find within us a being who has no voice in the human world, and to sense what that being needed to bring to the open attention of the Council, to which the two-legged ones were also allowed to be present—at least to listen very quietly.
Among those who turned up and gathered when the Council was called to order were Siberian tiger, a desperately polluted river, rock, fox (who is called pest only because some human brought him to a place where he is misplaced), and many others, including a couple of imperiled frogs. It is always transforming to hear the spontaneous and deeply wise, clear words that issue from the Beings, when humans offer them complete presence and respect, and give themselves genuine access to the pain of an overstressed earth being shared by everyone on it.
The presiding tiger faced with extinction finally asked for summary words of advice from the Council to hand on to the two-legged ones, about how to respond to the fate of the world. One of the frogs hopped forward immediately and said that it was really very simple. It came down to just two words in fact, that even any human being could remember.
And the words were: Love it! Love it! Love it! Love it!
But just as with Daowu and Yunyan, the other frog in the circle, who also had a distinctive frog-song that was exactly equal with any other frog, offered not so much a correction as a clarification of how to actualize this unimpeachable advice.
And the words were: Live it! Live it! Live it! Live it!
And Yet
But what of the countless and endless contesting thoughts that arise in the human mind? How do they fit in with mountains and rivers and feelings, with the many hands and eyes throughout the body? Can we say a sentence like thoughts, feelings, mountains, rivers, oceans, twigs, bears, ants, wombats? Is it possible thoughts simply take their natural place as evanescent arisings and vanishings just like every other creature here on earth? When we can open to that, it’s plain our human kind of thinking is born of the earth, too, and is entirely in the right place. It belongs; it’s not an enemy.
The Enmei Jikku Kannon Gyo, or Sutra of Timeless Life, chanted in deep recognition of the wisdom of compassion in Zen settings all over the world, says, “Morning my thoughts are Kanzeon, evening my thoughts are Kanzeon.” This doesn’t just invoke a state in which at every moment my thoughts turn toward compassion. It says, “Thought after thought arises in mind, thought after thought is no other than Mind”: these thoughts are also nothing but Kanzeon herself.
This is something not just to look into but practice into. We’ll never extinguish the prodigious talent of the mind to produce thoughts, and why should we, why would we? A relationship with thought forms the holding-power of practice; thought is encountered but there is freedom to choose how to hold that thought. Taken as reality? Or held open, held with the power of question. The whole subtle, rich, and even poetic experience of practice opens from this skillful move.
But thoughts themselves are inseparable from this very body. So it is not a matter of fighting your mind and doubting its trustworthy nature, but of finding vast (unrestricted and awake) freedom in your very nature just as you are. Not purified of thought, but just as you are in this very joy and sorrow; at home here on the earth within an ocean of bright clouds, an ocean of solemn clouds. Because we do come just as we are to realization. Mortal and undefended, unborn and sprouting two hands, guided by eyes that see past separateness, to repair harm and heal injuries, the ones we may find in front of us, the ones we strew behind us in our wake.
For now, as Peacemaker might say, we are being shown by every single one of the so-called ten thousand things and the many beings that constantly ask us to wake up: Be here. Love it, love it, live it, live it!
All of them, crow, frogs, wind, twig, stars are constantly showing what being here really is. Each is the Morning Star piercing the clouds of mind to reveal this very self, hands and eyes throughout its body.